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Evaluation of the Early College High School Initiative

Oct 2009

Project

Since 2002, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has funded a groundbreaking initiative designed to improve the college readiness and college completion rates of students underrepresented in postsecondary education. The Early College High School Initiative (ECHSI) funds the development of Early College Schools (ECSs) that provide students the opportunity to simultaneously pursue a high school diploma and earn college credits. AIR, with our partner SRI International, evaluate the ECHSI using qualitative (e.g., interviews with grantees and site visits to schools) and quantitative data sources (e.g., surveys of students and collection of school data) to document and describe the implementation of this initiative and the performance of students, particularly in comparison to other students.

Related Work

The findings in this report, which extend the Early College, Early Success study’s original results by including an additional year of data, affirm the core findings: Early College students had a greater opportunity than their peers to enroll in and graduate from college.

Early College programs provide underserved students with exposure to, and support in, college while they are in high school. This study finds that Early College students were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in—and graduate from—college than their peers who did not take part in the program.

This report for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation examines how Early College Schools (ECS) can best prepare high school students for college success. The report presents findings from high school and college instructional data collected during site visits to ECS classrooms in the 2008–09 academic year, as part of the Early College High School Initiative (ECHSI).

This is the fifth annual synthesis report for the Early College High School Initiative. A brief overview shows that although the ECHSI continued to grow in terms of the number of schools participating, the growth was slower than in prior years. It also is clear that fewer ECSs are opening as conversions from existing schools.